Deus Ex Q&A

The Firing Squad tossed up a interview with ION Storm's Harvey Smith about their just released Unreal engined shooter - Deus Ex: Invisible War:

FiringSquad: When you sat down to work on the Invisible War design document, what were the biggest fixes from Deus Ex you wanted to make?

Harvey:: Wow, good question, because we did spend a lot of time analyzing and deconstructing the first Deus Ex game. We came to some strong conclusions: We knew that being a hybrid shooter/adventure game/RPG was key. We knew that a deep story with themes related to power and control was core to the Deus Ex experience. Perhaps most importantly, we wanted to continue with our high level vision related to 'multiple solutions to problems' and emergent gameplay. We did a lot of this behind the scenes during the game design preproduction phase (with a subset of what would eventually be the full team), and it informed the entire project.

Additionally, after Deus Ex, we wanted to improve the AI and pathfinding, we wanted to streamline the interface (preserving the features and power, but making it more elegant) and we wanted to avoid 'forced failures' in the story (as when we offerered the player the illusion/false choice of siding with the bad guys).